How do we get out of here?

[GliderGuider]

I've posted a new web article that combines an update of my recent Thermodynamic Footprint work with an update of the "sustainable population levels" writing from the threads here and on FB. Skipping the arithmetic and the graphs, here are a couple of excerpts.

How do we get out of here?

How might we get from where we are today to a sustainable world population of 50 million or less? First of all, we should discard the notion of "managing" any population decline, let alone one this big, through education or official policies. People are not capable of taking these kinds of decisions on anything but an individual or small-group level, where they will make precious little difference to the final outcome. Politicians will by and large not even propose an idea like "managed decline" - not if they want to gain power or remain in power, anyway. China's brave experiment with one-child families notwithstanding, any global decline will be purely involuntary.

A world population decline would be triggered and fed by our civilization's encounter with limits. These limits may show up in any area: accelerating climate change, weather extremes, shrinking food supplies, fresh water depletion, shrinking energy supplies, pandemic diseases, breakdowns in the social fabric due to excessive complexity, supply chain breakdowns, electrical grid failures, a breakdown of the international financial system, international hostilities - the list of candidates is endless, and their interactions are far too complex to predict.

In 2007, a couple of years after I totally understood the concept of Peak Oil, I wrote my first and still my most popular web article on population decline: Population: The Elephant in the Room. In it I sketched out the picture of a monolithic population collapse - a straight-line decline from today's seven billion people to just one billion by the end of this century.

As time has passed I've become less confident in this particular dystopian vision. It now seems to me that human beings may be just a bit tougher than that. We would fight like demons to stop the slide, though we would potentially do a lot more damage to the environment in the process. We would try with all our might to cling to civilization and rebuild our former glory. Different physical, environmental and social situations around the world would result in a great diversity in regional outcomes. To put it plainly, a simple "slide to oblivion" is not in the cards for any species that could recover from the giant Toba volcanic eruption in just 75,000 years.

What might we do?

To be absolutely clear, after ten years of investigating what I affectionately call "The Global Clusterfuck", I do not think it can be prevented, mitigated or managed in any way. If and when it happens, it will follow its own dynamic, and the force of events could easily make the Japanese and Andaman tsunamis seem like a pleasant day at the beach. The preparations that can be made will all happen at the individual and small-group scale. It will be up to each of us to decide what our skills, resources and motivation call us to do. It will be different for each of us - even for people in the same neighborhood, let alone people on opposite sides of the world.

I've been saying for a couple of years now that we will each do whatever we think is appropriate to the circumstances, in whatever part of the world we can reach. The outcome of our actions is utterly unforeseeable, because it depends on how the efforts of all 7 billion of us converge, co-operate and compete. The end result will be different from place to place - climate change impacts will vary, resources vary, social structures vary, values and belief systems are different all over the world. The best we can do is to do our best.

Here is my advice:

• Stay awake to what's happening around us.
  
• Don't get hung up by other peoples' "shoulds and shouldn'ts".
  
• Examine our values, and if they aren't in alignment with we think the world needs, change them.
  
• Stop blaming people. Others are as much victims of the times as we are - even the CEOs and politicians.
  
• Blame, anger and outrage is pointless. It wastes precious energy that we are going to need for more useful work.
  
• Laugh a lot, at everything - including ourselves.
  
• Hold all the world's various beliefs and "isms" lightly, including our own.
  
• Forgive others. Forgive ourselves. For everything.
  
• Love everything just as deeply as you can.

That's what I think might be helpful. If we get all that personal stuff right, then doing the physical stuff about food, water, housing, transportation, energy, politics and the rest of it will come easy. Or at least easier. And we will have a lot more fun doing it.

[Gregorian]

1. I always appreciate discussion of this subject.

When I look back instead of forward, like I think you are doing as well, I see how we survived life as difficult as it gets, and still managed to trample that which threatened us. It's ironic that that very strength is doing us in.

50 million? That seems extremely low.

Yes, I am in a somewhat self-destructive mode as I rage about how sick the human race is, as I watch the disaster unfold. I get so angry with the deforestation and pollution. It's helpful just to hear another's words on the subject. And for that I am grateful. We may be few, but we are not alone.


edit- I was thinking last night that this is all the result of human sexual behavior. I know you are advocating forgiveness, and love, but I have to say that if people were responsible, we wouldn't be in this mess. There's a girl band that did a tune back in the 90's with lyrics "Sex is for making babies". It's a feverish, high pitched screaming song. I will always remember how good it felt to hear it the first time. I am angry about how irresponsible almost everyone is with respect to sexual behavior. I suppose that is why I almost only encounter resistance when discussing this subject. Everyone knows they've contributed to it. Hell, I find it hard to forgive people for fucking up the world I live in. I live in it too.

[pscot]

2. We don't have any say in what will happen

It's not our human qualities that will keep the species going. If anything does. As our systems break down, isolated populations are going to sort things out for themselves.Support your local warlord.

[virgogal]

3. God love ya,get out and have some fun. Really.

[GliderGuider]

5. Is that like, "Jeez, get a life"?

Had one once, didn't think much of it. Now I do stuff like this instead...

[jonthebru]

4. You are making a couple of assumptions.

When the tipping point occurs and the cascade begins, with global climate change the livability of the whole planet may be poor. Even with good personal planning wherever one lives, the air and water situation and of course the out of control local order may make it nearly impossible to survive in most areas.
By the way, the Black Plague, 75 to 100 million, and the Flu Pandemic of 1918, 50 to 100 million, both culled the population.

So, whom will it be? Thee or me? WWII killed 50 to 70 million, Russia lost around 24 million... there must have been a lot of empty areas after that. Today with the use of depleted uranium in armaments the areas are unusable unless further death from radiation poisoning is accepted.

You are very correct about one thing; population is the problem. Also, people tend to forget. Our cultures will have to be forced to become truly "sustainable."

[wtmusic]

6. Please - just one instance of social change which has been initiated by people "laughing a lot".

GG, really...this is goofy.

I shouldn't get hung up by other peoples' "shoulds and shouldn'ts" - or should?

It's too easy for people to laugh a lot, at everything, while buying shit they don't need.

Too easy to forgive API for misrepresenting the effects of their dirty, 19th-century fuel in order to profit from it.

Too easy to justify buying that natgas-powered conversation pit for our deck by thinking, "The best we can do is our best."

Too easy, too simplistic, too naive, too accommodating. Disastrous. It's attitudes like this which are the source of our problem, not its solution.

[GliderGuider]

7. Very few large social changes have actually been initiated by "people"

No matter what mood they're in.

We implement social changes, of course, but we almost never initiate large-scale social changes - as much as we like to believe we do.

The real drivers for large-scale social change come from far below the level of conscious control. At the very least they come from deep in the cultural infrastructure. And if my theory is right, many of those infrastructural influences in turn come from an even deeper place - from the thermodynamic structure of the universe itself.

We can approach social change in several ways. For example we can approach it seriously and tightly, or playfully and lightly - grimly or joyfully. Given that the same change is going to happen in either case, why not choose the more pleasant approach? There's already enough misery to go around, why go looking for more?

[cprise]

8. You already jumped the shark with your overpopulation estimate

...and your reductionist misapplication of the laws of thermodynamics.

But this is just inane; Like pop songs and Hollywood movies that keep telling people to live in the moment. The mentality is a big reason why we're in this mess, because America's working class are too apt to drop their grievances as they are instructed to indulge instead. They're already doing what you counsel by the millions, and drowning the resulting helplessness in religious fervor, engrossing entertainments and anti-psychotic medications.

The climate crisis is an ultimate expression of a very one-sided class war. Too many of the upper class assume its simply a matter of letting markets take their course where the wealth disparity ensures they can always buy into the environmental high-ground and stay "dry", while the poor are pushed to the margins of what is considered safe and can drown. IMO its a very nasty delusion to harbor, filled with determined indifference and nasty intentions.

Do not go quietly into that good night, SIR.

[GliderGuider]

9. Here's a question about sharks and population

Given that we are now demonstrably out of balance with the biophysical systems of the planet - i.e. our numbers and activity levels are visibly unsustainable - when was the last time humanity was demonstrably in balance with the planet?

My answer to that question is that the last time I can point to and say with confidence that we were in balance was some time shortly after the invention of agriculture but well before the birth of Christ. The human presence has been one of increasing growth and imbalance ever since that time.

As a result, when I look for a model of human sustainability, I have to look back to that time, and take our numbers and activity levels back then as a limit. We cannot "grow into" sustainability, which is an idea that makes a lot of modern techno-environmentalists extremely uncomfortable.

My understanding of thermodynamics is that its principles make self-organization, the spontaneous appearance of order, and cumulative increases in local complexity absolutely inevitable. They seem to operate at all levels, from the initial appearance of matter out of the energy soup after the Big Bang, through the formation of stars, galaxies and planets, to the appearance of life in ever-more complex forms, right up to the incredible self-organized complexity of modern human culture.

Could you explain your use of the word "reductionist"? Because it doesn't seem to apply here.